7 comments:

I got my first digital camera (and it was Canon PowerShot A610) two years ago. It is ok and produces good images.

Now I've decided to look around and see what the digital industry has to offer today.

The first thing I came upon was Olympus SP-560 UZ. It looked like a great bargain to me. Really, the wide angle which I have been badly missing with my A610 and a superb zoom level!!!

However upon looking at sample photos scattered around the web, I noticed they were not as sharp and vivid in color as I got used to get with my Canon camera. So I read some more articles (and found your site, btw) and thought: ok, maybe x18 zoom is a little bit too much. You can't have everything working great in one box.

So I kept on browsing the web looking primarily for wide angles. Found FujiFilm s9600 again featuring both cool wide angle abilities and x10 zoom. However, sample pictures looked boring again compared to those produced by Canon cameras. And the camera itself was released two years ago meaning why should I buy a camera released two years ago today when there is so much innovating stuff available?

So… I am frustrated. Canon doesn’t want to produce wide angle cameras. I’m sure its SX100 or G9 do great pictures and their lens is great too, but the minimal focus length I can get with them is 36mm. Some of my friends bought entry levels SLRs like Canon EOS 350D and are happy. I’m not sure if I want a SLR. After all, I’m rather a point-and-shooter and the idea of changing lens every time I switch from portraits to scenery scares me.

Should I wait a year or two until Canon releases a point-and-shoot wide angle camera? And what if it’s not going to do so in the nearest 10 years?

Or should I buy an entry level SLR and forget about zoom levels higher than 3?

What do you say?

P.S. I mistakenly posted this comment on one of your previous articles. Thought I might never look at it there and so decided to re-post it here.

First, you can buy a Wide-Engle converter with adapter, which available for most of Canon’s point and shoot cameras. However, if you are looking for sharp and vivid in color pictures, it is really better to look through SLR cameras. I was shooting with an excellent Nikon 8700 with fish-eye lens and I was disappointed with its results. Any SRLs with cheap kit (18-70 or 18-55) lens can more. In your case, you can buy an SLR with 18-200mm lens and forget about swapping lenses. Nevertheless, an SLR is the next than point and shoot camera level. It is a pleasure to shooting with DSLR camera. If you need more information, be my guest.

I am confused about which camera I must buy to take fotografs of dolphins dorsal fins for a fotoid project at my university.

The place of the project is in the Amazon, where there are all kinds of weather and is terribly humid and hot all times.

Shooting river dolphins is a complicated task because we never know where they will surface so depending where you are looking at you might be lucky to have it in front of you and you need to take the foto very fast in order to get it on film.

Until now I have used my digital camera Olympus A230 with 30x digital zoom but the quality of images were realy bad so I am deciding to buy a SLR camera.

I have been studying some cameras and taking advice from other people but I am still confused and need some help on deciding which camera i should by.

Please i am a newby on digital SLR fotografy and know hardly few thing on this.

Knowing this I found that there are three models which might be good to choose from:

- Nikon D80- Canon 30D- Pentax K200D- Sony A200

All these cameras are good to do the job i think but Nikon and Canon will be the most costly because they I will need the image stabilizer lenses 300mm and they are very expensive.

The Pentax and Sony camera has already built in imager stabiolizer and lenses cost less that the others and Pentax it has bult in protective dress agains bad weathers etc.

I obviously need a super fast auto focus camera with light weight with IS also as I will be making fotos in a raft in a lake.

I was thinking on the Sony A200. What do you think?

Having said this I need strong advice on what to buy... I have US$600-800 to spend on the camera and lense. The lense i need is 300mm to get the dolphin realy close and a fast shooting camera with higher frames per second.